Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Ninety
The terrible, encompassing malevolence was too much to take in all at once. Felecia’s sudden willingness to become one with the water below and let it take her was only curbed by the stray thought that dying there, letting the water fill her lungs, would certainly leave her to be a meal. If the dreaded thing, the impossible being that held the ship aloft didn’t fancy her meat, something else would. Something slimy, something with far too many appendages, something with a massive mouth and row upon row of teeth would smell her and tuck in.
Somehow, worse than being devoured, was the idea of her lifeless body sinking ever deeper until it found the foul muck at the bottom. She had touched the bottom of a murky pond in the forest, she knew how awful the sediment of rot felt in her hands. She could still feel the cold, gritty, horror of the candlemakers corrupted flesh as it sluffed and squished between her agonized fingers. Nothing was worse than the idea of floating to the bottom only to slowly become, that.
Felecia only stayed standing because her pride refused to let her die and become one with the bottom of the fathomless deep. She only stayed alive because breathing was a reptilian thing, root evolution if you believed the books that she spent so many days and nights reading.
The awful, encompassing evil that emanated all around Felecia in that dire time fed on her simple instinct and took every inch of advantage as it left her to grow cold and tired in the salty brine of the shattered boat. Her thoughts eventually shifted to her nightmares, the ones about the drunkard from that night in the village sure, his shambling gate, the gooey black awfulness that drained from his every orifice, the awful pale blue lamp light of the obscene lure that hung over the top of his denuded skull as he did every unspeakable thing to her ruined body. Really though, the nightmare about her time spent scoping out the big house was chief, then and always. The red painted gas cans, slowly poured and quickly shook, all of them heavy once and made light by splashing their contents along the way. The quick lighting of the gas and the sudden step back as she realized just how much damage was about to be done, all by her own hand. The calls and cries and shouts, watching dearest Nana lean out of her window to admonish the filthy girl standing next to the porch with her stinky, sooty hands.
You should have done it.
You still could, you know. Just walk through the woods and wait behind Phillip’s house until the wee hours. You could creep up to the carriage house and collect as much kerosine as you could carry and more and…
Images of the big house, Rotary house, engulfed in flames, its inhabitants choking and screaming their last breaths, swallowed Felecia’s mind until she could almost taste the smoke. Her eyes began to water and she felt her skin grow hot. The icy sea water that had numbed her nearly to the waist began to feel like bath water and through it all Felecia could only just manage to keep herself from embracing the awful idea in its entirety.
A test? A chance? A way out or worse, a way in? There would come so many cold days, so many rainy and snowy nights that would be consumed by questions that had no answer. Whatever it was that had drug her out to sea that day and held her so briefly a loft. Devil or God, terrifying dweller of the seas lowest depths, or just an encounter with some hysterical kraken of yore.
Felecia bucked and boiled under the savage heat and passed, or failed, or maybe a bit of both. She wouldn’t allow the nightmare to consume her, she knew she wouldn’t march up to the big house in the dead of night and set it alight so as to watch all the pretty, petty people come running outside with their hair and clothes a blaze. She knew she would never know what it was to watch so many dull fireworks howl and run the courtyard until their legs gave out.